Thursday night’s debate between the vice presidential candidates “was more collegial, thinking out loud as opposed to just hammering points,” Payack said in trying to explain the difference. “It was a much calmer style.”

His analysis ranked the candidates’ speech on several other levels, too. Here’s the breakdown:

Jeremy Lott has a great article in the Guardian highlighting key points of epic win:

US vice-presidential debates tend to be more interesting than presidential back and fourths. Many people remember Bob Dole’s crack about “Democrat Wars” in 1976, as Gerald Ford’s running mate. Who can recall even one word from his three debates with Bill Clinton 20 years later? Lloyd Bentsen caught Dan Quayle like a deer in the headlights in 1988 by stating the obvious (that he wasn’t a Kennedy). Dick Cheney’s two debates were case studies in how to calmly cut your opponent’s, er, knees off.

Sarah Palin showed on Thursday night that she has her own way of winning: kill him with kindness. From her opening line to Joe Biden – “Hey, can I call you Joe?” – to her brazen refusal to “answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear” to her groan-worthy zinger “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” she sounded upbeat, lyrical, and kinda Minnesotan, dontcha know.

She also sounded like a winner, which was vexing to many debate watchers, especially uptight liberal ones. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson confessed an hour into the exchange “I don’t know what anybody is making of this. I don’t even know what I’m making of it. This is the strangest debate I’ve ever seen.”

But it wasn’t so strange, really, to people who have been observing Palin for any length of time. She has bucked the odds in the past to win bruising elections with meagre resources. She is good at delivering vicious attacks in a way that doesn’t seem at all vicious until you take a step back to look at them.

Last night, Palin used Biden to bludgeon Obama like so: “You opposed the move he made to try to cut off funding for the troops and I respect you for that. I don’t know how you can defend that position now but I know that you know especially with your son in the National Guard and I have great respect for your family also and the honor that you show our military. Barack Obama though, another story there. Anyone I think who can cut off funding for the troops after promising not to is another story.”

First, I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words.

Eat them.

Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.

Her performance also underscored the underhandedness of the hatchet job editors at ABC News and CBS News, which failed to capture her solid competence on the whole array of foreign and domestic policy issues on the debate table tonight. (I didn’t care for all the “greed” rhetoric, but I understand they are trying to appeal to independents and Dems. They’re trying to win the election.)

Pause to reflect on this: She matched — and trumped several times — a man who has spent his entire adult life on the political stage, run for president twice, and as he mentioned several times, chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.